All posts tagged John Cheever

In 2003, Blake Bailey met with Benjamin Cheever, the eldest son of the late author John Cheever, to discuss writing a tell-all biography. Unlike the Scott Donaldson biography of Cheever, Bailey was given open access to Cheever’s life, lovers, letters and journals. On Thursday, Bailey won the National Book Critics Circle 2009 biography award for “Cheever: A Life.”

Bailey talked to Speakeasy about the award and his 770-page biography.

Wall Street Journal: The biography of John Cheever, how did you conceive it?

Blake Bailey: My last book before the John Cheever biography was a biography of Richard Yates and often Cheever and Yates are linked together because they are both chroniclers of the post-war suburbs and they both take sort of a bleak, satirical tone. And Cheever was one of my favorite authors but at first I didn’t want to do Cheever because I had this fixed idea that I wanted to be the first biographer of whoever I did like I was with Yates, and there had been a previous biography of John Cheever.

What will 2010 bring in the way of culture, media, world events, economic matters, technology and Tiger-sized scandals? Speakeasy asked several writers to offer their thoughts on the coming year. The predictions range from a vigorous defense of the book to the resurgence of a certain mustachioed ‘80s pop star. Over the next few days we’ll publish the results. Check back throughout the weekend for more 2010 essays.

One of my very favorite stories by John Cheever, “The Jewels of the Cabots,” contains a passage in which he describes what the newspapers would be like if they were constrained to publish good news. New Year’s prognostications should be similarly limited. It would be too easy to talk about all the horrible stuff that is liable to happen in 2010: an emboldened Tea Party movement on the right side of American politics, a quagmire in Afghanistan, further weakening in the real estate market leading to another sharp downturn in stocks, more saber-rattling among Islamists, and so on.

But if we were going to concentrate, instead, on what might be good among the possible outcomes of 2010, what might we include? I would like to concentrate on an area of personal interest to me: the future of the book! Just yesterday I happened to read that Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, in a slightly cooked account of Xmas 2009, had the temerity to trumpet the moment in which e-book sales exceeded traditional book sales (neglecting to carve out the numbers of free titles available online). What galls me, in a moment like this, is the baldness of self-interest included in the prediction. Bezos is trying to ship Kindles, the e-book readers his company produces. And so it’s no surprise, as a New Media type, that he would look down on the
500-year tradition of the physical book when he has a bottom line to worry about. He liked books back when all he sold was books, when he biked from customer to customer, but now that he sells Kindles?

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.